Feedjit

Can You Please Pass the Pepper!

The foodies among us generally chant the phrase “We live to eat!” while some of us, hopefully few, are the “We eat to live” variety. Either way, whether you enjoy eating or not, there’s no question that food provides us with sustenance and nutrition. Different foods provide us with different levels of nutrients and of different varieties: carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, micronutrients…

Now, not only do we get different combinations of nutrients, some are absorbed better by the body than others. This concept of bioavailability states that the real amount of nutrients, like vitamins, isn’t so much the amount present and consumed in your food, but rather how much of this nutrient your body actually absorbed and processed and was not just excreted. For example, 1 cup of whole raw almonds contains: 378mg Calcium (Ca), 5.32mg Iron (Fe), 383mg Magnesium (Mg), 1008mg Potassium (K), and 37.49mg Vitamin E. However, these numbers may not actually reflect the amount of nutrients your body will actually absorb.

In fact, whatever ends up getting absorbed is referred to as the bioavailability of those nutrients. There does not seem to be a hard and fast rule on how bioavailable one nutrient is over another. In fact, one nutrient may be more bioavailable from one food source and less so from another. Each person’s metabolism also plays a role. Also, cooking can sometimes affect the bioavailability of nutrients in food. For example, until you cook spinach, the calcium in it is inaccessible to our bodies (sorry to all of you who eat those spinach salads – it’s doing nuthin’ for you!).

Do not despair! Apparently, adding certain ingredients to your meal or consuming them with other foods can actually increase the bioavailability of nutrients you consume. According to the website Wisebread.com (Bioavailability: How to Get More Nutrients from Your Food), adding black pepper to your meal not only adds some spice but can actually boost the bioavailability of the food. Not to mention, black pepper also acts as an “anti-depressant, pain reliever, and antacid…[as well as] boost brain functioning, and help you sleep.” Now that is what I call a boost!